Sacrifice: James Mission 9

James gives us his ultimate creature, and 'ultimate' is quite right.


Rhinok
1900 Mana, 5 Souls

Unlike Hellmouths, Rhinoks are ground-bound, and they're also quite a bit slower. Technically speaking, there's no deviation from standard statlines -if you compare a Hellmouth's ground speed to a Rhinok, the Rhinok has the James-correct modification for that. It's just that Hellmouth flying speed is then double their walking speed, which means the Rhinok walks about a third the speed a Hellmouth flies.

This comparatively awful movement speed is the closest thing to a disadvantage Rhinoks have.

The Rhinok has a short-to-mid-range ranged attack, which explodes into a spray of spikes along the ground in a shockingly huge area around the target. This has no possibility of friendly fire. While the attack is ground-crawling and so theoretically shouldn't be able to hit air units, it can absolutely catch them if they're flying low enough (Which several air units default to flying low enough) and anyway Rhinoks have a Halo of Earth activatable ability that works exactly as per James' Halo of Earth spell except that there's no casting time. You click it, and suddenly they have rocks hovering over them to murder air units with. Assuming their ability does the same damage as the Halo of Earth spell itself, that's around 3600 damage they can spawn instantly, in a game where the toughest units cap out at a little over 7000. (Though Rhinoks, said toughest unit in the game, are also resistant to every damage type except melee, just like Hellmouths; it would take four full Halos of Earth to kill a Rhinok, not two)

The extreme splash radius on the Rhinok's attack means that once you've got 4 or so Rhinoks, they start straight-up murdering unlimited numbers of many unit types. An enemy wizard having a numbers advantage just... stops helping. And 4 Rhinoks is also enough to kill a regular wizard (Before shields, admittedly) in one volley, even at max level, which can easily lead to situations where your Rhinoks kill the wizard and all their stuff at once, letting you trivially loot a bunch of souls.

Rhinoks do have a surprisingly short range, a huge model that makes it so ranged attacks tend to hit them, and unit regeneration in Sacrifice is not percentile so their extremely high HP tends to not recover all that much between fights, so ideally you'd back them with some powerful healing effects of the sort James simply doesn't have (Or hey, Animate Dead works fantastically with them too), but seriously the Rhinok is the best unit in the game and probably straight-up broken on a design level. Critical mass of Rhinoks is not meaningfully counterable, and the number of souls needed to reach critical mass isn't actually that high. The things that kinda counter them are also... not precisely specialized, but they aren't standard concepts; damage over time effects are good against them, for example, but that's a Pyro/Charnel specialty. Several of the ultimate spells are good against Rhinoks, but they take longer to cast than Teleport does and generally signal clearly that they're being cast, so it's not that hard to simply bounce away. That kind of issue.

The Rhinok is just ridiculous.

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The mission is... irritating. I set Grakkus to defend primarily to show off the mission properly -avoid having Grakkus Desecrate an Altar off-screen or solo the map by himself or anything. (I've had him solo the map, that's not an exaggeration. He starts with two Rhinoks and is willing and able to summon more, after all) Realistically, it's probably smarter to set him to attack, as otherwise you're doing a 3v1 (Until Jadugar dies, anyway) where the only good news is that your enemies will run into a strong defense force if they slip past you or overwhelm you rather than Desecrating your Altar, and that's an iffy comfort given Teleport and that his defensive behavior is patrolling close enough to the Prime Altar an enemy may well simply Desecrate that, which instantly defeats you.

You're facing Hachimen and Abraxus, with Jadugar teleporting in once you get near the area he and Charlotte have their cinema in, and everybody is high level and willing to use extremely powerful spells and units, which can lead to some fairly infuriating situations. My original run actually involved my entire army being wiped at one point and a good portion of it stolen before I gave up in disgust, and this run had plenty of problems... even ignoring me accidentally Boring my two Boulderdashes back when those and one Rhinok was my entire military. Be careful with Bore! Especially in a straight James force, where your units are slow. I noticed the issue at literally the last second, but with other armies that might've been early enough!

Jadugar doesn't actually have an Altar (Well, technically he does as I've covered before, though I've never tried finding it), so killing him takes him out of the fight instantly. As such, he should ideally be your first target. According to the wiki he actually does have a Shrine on the map -unlike the Rag Man back in James mission 4- so he can steal your souls, which is just one more reason to get him dealt with ASAP.

Once that's done, the mission is... actually pretty straightforward, even aside Grakkus potentially soloing it. It's just a high-level 2v2, with the only weird qualifier being that losing your ally's Altar kills you.

This is, incidentally, the first time we've seen Grakkus in these videos. He doesn't show up in very many missions, and he's distributed, uh, oddly. His wizard modifiers are that he has a massive HP boost, +1000 HP over base when wizards have 1550 at Level 1 and only gain 50 more per level, but in exchange he also moves slower. Since he's a mono-James wizard, the speed penalty tends to work out to just offsetting the AI's stupidity some, such that he's not constantly leaving his army in the dust like eg Charlotte does.

It's worth pointing out that Zyzyx arguably makes an oblique reference to Grakkus being slow, though he doesn't refer to Grakkus being tough, strangely enough. Regardless, Grakkus is unique for being the only wizard in the campaign who has an actual penalty of any kind. (Seerix is functionally part of this category in some missions, but she doesn't have actual stat penalties or outright holes in her spell list)

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Narratively, Stratos has jumped way up in suspicion. Jadugar's 'master' works for Stratos? When we know from Charnel's route that Jadugar works for Marduk? So back in Charnel's route, not only was Stratos lying about Marduk and working with him, but he -or at least his wizard thought this- outright viewed Marduk as a kind of servant?

It's also worth pointing out that the dialogue between Mithras/Marduk and Eldred at the beginning of the final mission isn't completely identical to the dialogue back in the Charnel version. Charnel Eldred got a speech to the effect of 'you've been a bad guy! Why don't you understand my bad guy-ness as a result?!' where James Eldred gets a speech much more along the lines of 'you're an idiot even though you're a wizard'. So don't skip out on the video at the victory screen.

... that said, I hate the bit with Charlotte and Jadugar. There's... factors we haven't witnessed yet that tie into this, but for the moment I can point out the sheer arbitrariness of it. How did Jadugar follow Charlotte here to kill her? Plot arbitrariness! In turn, he kills her in a cinema when they exchange spell blows because shut up, James doesn't have an additional Altar in the area for Charlotte to take advantage of even though from James' perspective it should be obvious that he should have enough Altars for all his wizards in his capitol given wizards apparently respawn back in their god's capitol when their Altar is desecrated outside of it, and Charlotte stands there exchanging blows for no real reason. Oh, and Abraxus teleports in to rebuke Jadugar and then vanishes. The whole thing flies in the face of everything about the game's worldbuilding we've seen, and it's completely pointless and unnecessary. Having Charlotte actually spawn in within gameplay would tend to lead to her getting killed if we're going to run with the no-backup-Altar thing, the no-backup-Altar thing is a baffling lack of common sense and conscientiousness from a god whose whole thing is being worried about his people... and like I said, there's other factors that contribute to me not liking this that we'll get to eventually.

It's awful and I don't get why this made it into the game.

See you next James mission.